Commercial and Iconic Headshots

Lesson 6 of 11

Shoot: Glamour Headshot 1

Commercial and Iconic Headshots

Lesson 6 of 11

Shoot: Glamour Headshot 1

Lesson Info

Shoot: Glamour Headshot 1

So my goal today was to show you guys is many different fun things you could do with head shots. A lot of people think shooting headshots is boring, you know? They immediately think of just this one, you know, stagnant, staged looking image, it's what you make of it. So where will you bring the light? You're going to get the results you're wanting and you have to know what you want, asai said. In the beginning this morning, we worked with natural light, moving that around and seeing that you can work through difficulty, light situation and still get a great looking shot. If you're patient, you keep moving it. Sometimes you might need somebody to help you on those days to make sure that reflectors just in the right spot, but that makes all the difference in the world to get the light in the eyes and to find your subject. Do you understand what I mean by find your stuff subject? Well, our subject this time is coming to us with already prepared she's glamorous, she might be in a pageant, ...

she might be looking for work as a model to get into that kind of industry, she might be looking to be a cosmetic girl, so what I've designed for this shot is to show you studio driven lighting setups with that mind. Because that's, a huge industry and women love to be in it there's lots and lots of people that enter every pageant in every town all over the united states. So if you think you're interested in it, why don't you just start researching in your area and you'll see be blown away with the opportunities that exist go? You go to a little bit more trouble for these shoots than you do for what I just showed you thought this morning we were looking at about two hours worth of work, you know, for somebody to come and for especially for a guy to run through a couple of different outfits like that. If I continue shooting without talking, I probably could have gotten another outfit or two in that time frame. I think differently about shooting after headshots, then the norm. The norm is you get one outfit for x amount of dollars or two outfits for x amount of dollars. Everybody's focused on the money when I think you should be focused on the quality and then set a price for it and the building willing to do whatever you can do in that certain amount of time for the person when agents see how much trouble you went to for the person, you're going to be the one against two calls not this other person this boston around the business with bad attitudes so remember to keep your passion in the forefront of whatever you do in this environment, you're gonna have the same thing, but this is a little more fun. It's a little more interesting light you can't go wrong with this kind of like this is going to be working with the beauty dish first in these bowen's lights, I'm going to just show you how easy they are to work with to start, I'm gonna turn this head around for you with this beauty dish on the top. Um, these when you come down to it without all the modifiers don't cost that much more than your speed likes for a studio set up. These kits come with two, five hundred watt packs to stands, two umbrellas and trigger, and the trigger is a pulse are trigger and you insert the card on top here and then all works from this nice little device here there's two buttons on it and a channel very easy to operate. They pack down into a nice little case I can show you guys the case a little later when demonstrating the light my evening. Part are late afternoon part of tomorrow, and we will be glad to show you any more about that if you want, but they worked there simply think you can adjust your light and full stops or tenths of a stop between. So if you decided you wanted to adjust the light from our test shot here, we were shooting it like, uh, f eight and I'll say you wanted to, like, tone it down a half a stop so you get a little more skin tone in there. You literally come to this dough and turn it down, it's just super, super easy, some of the other lining that I've worked with the numbers or set, but you have to push the button and turn it, and the numbers don't start it one so you have five stops toe work with, which is really awesome. So that being said, this is a beauty dish, I prefer the white beauty dish when I'm working in the studio in the silver one when I'm working outside, they have this is a deep, dished be dish, those they have two versions of the silver one, and they're really small, so if you are working in really small studio and you have small space, the beauty dish in octo bach's air good choices because they're very narrow and their death and take up a lot of space, so if you like to use a lot of lights and you start putting modifiers, you could see how you can totally like completely fill up your studio with your lighting modifiers. My first favorite tool is a beauty dish because you can use it to do anything with its thin enough and cool enough that you can modify a number of different ways I'd like to work with grids, so what I'm going to do with the first shoot was go through a serious here where I'm doing one light and how to manipulate the one light to make it look like more and I'm going to show you the way that it looks differently on our subject. With makeup and hair and so forth the grid is basically going to take the quality of light is coming from the beauty dish just narrow the spread of it to maia beauty dish redirects light it doesn't totally soften the light, so is it's really close? You can still have a shadow cast under the chin if you would like to see that if you want the drama, if you want to eliminate it, we have this thing called a sock, which means you're basically making it into a little tiny soft box I used sometimes both the grid and the soft. So my first goal is to show you just how to do a serious beauty shot. We're gonna work with this awesome fan this's from bowen's as well. You turn it off and own it has a rheostat on the side it's very quiet. It can get really loud if you turn it up to full power, but you could shoot an evening dress that was made out of chiffon and make that evening dress blues straight up in the air so powerful if you set it down on the ground when I'm using it on beauty, I pointed at the center of the chest and not the face because you want the bottom of the hair to blow, and if you turn the pan on too high from the beginning, you're going to devastate the hair. So beauty hair for a pageant stuff doesn't hold up really long. It's exaggerated two times three times bigger than normal hair would be so you want to make sure your stylist, if you can constabulary set to make sure that volume stays in the hair, the photograph, the makeup that you want to request for a beauty shot on a pageant girl is going to have a lot of contrast to it. And you may ask them about stage makeup where they put the highlighted tease on across the face and then build the face on top of that what that does is the contrast really pushes the eyes mouth and nose forward and it really puts light into the face from the makeup standpoint most makeup artists know about that so if you can ask him about it and give it a try I also want you to look at the different levels that you can shoot at with your camera on this you might find yourself I've got this tall stool and she's long and tall on the torso knowing that I want to shoot right into her eyes I'm gonna look at this structure of her face and if I decide I wanna have a little more drama and open up the hair I might lower my angle down to put a little more power emphasis on her so we'll move her and jewish her around and I'll let you see how the light effects each and every shot we do and they're going to keep changing the modifiers underneath so you guys can take a nice little study on that maybe you could go with something interesting for yourself so here she comes so over the years I've shot lots of cosmetic ads and the the actual lighting that I would use its not far off from what I'm going to show you today there's a little stool right there you can either use one or both we see what you look like sitting all right beautiful all right, so what I did first is I set up my classic scenario here did you guys come in with the other stool? I'm gonna start with that perfect so you guys the test you'll be able to see as I'm shooting again just like before I'm going to kind of work through this just like I would for myself I'd have her come in and sit down I usually do a test on somebody before she gets there so I sort of have a different you know, an idea where I want to be as I'm looking at her I'm making a decision about what kind of reflect her I want to put underneath her face so here's my I'm going to show you several different fun things you can do just with a beauty too straight out um do you see how much light watch watch the eyes themselves can you lead comes coach all the way up to your like right on top of this so when you can lean onto the table a little bit too just don't lose your collarbones in the process so when I'm shooting beauty I'm again wanting to face to really protrude forward like that but the other thing I want to do is bring some beautiful light into her gorgeous eyes um I picked the outfit for the highlights in her hair and the colors of her eyes. So everything's like jumping out at you the background is kind of insignificant. It's just kind of going to go away to a nice white. So just by putting these cake pans here, you can see just by the modeling light how much life could be brought into the face. So here we see imperfections, right? I'm going to show you how to do this in several different ways. All right, girls, can you come over somebody come by the fan, somebody come to help me with this. So did you see how you hold it? There you put your fingers there, you can roll this will got here. All right? I love things on wheels so I could do what we just did. So everything that I shoot for beauty is close and tight like this. Like this there you go, write your head's gonna come forward toward me and push your forehead this way. All right, beautiful, gorgeous. You may take this one little test shot should pop up a little bit too from there should be about f a little further than that even again, beautiful check my power in the light there, just tell me where we're headed, turn it all the way down all right, great. I don't want to really go over f a I can keep from it, so we're gonna take the power down a little bit beautiful. Hossam so my camera level right now is shooting right into her nose and eyes were coming look closer, chin down a little bit beautiful. Relax. All right, let's, take a picture without this phil card just completely made it away right now just lean into the same thing. They'd be a little interesting it with your eyes they're beautiful. Listen, I'd love to see these two images side by side with this one in the previous one just so you could see how much of a difference just having the phil underneath the eyes can make nothing was changed. They're just moving the phil. All right, now I'm going to show you another little treat guy. So what I was thinking to is I'd liketo lower your seat down. Can we turn the bach on its side? That dress is so beautiful. Um, yeah that's perfect and what you want to do when your position her here this is a mirror you can use a six dollar full length mirror if you don't spend any money, I usually got an antique store and buy mirrors for beauty shot soundly I don't use nero's under everybody's face, but watch what happens to her face now we'll look at all three of those side by side with just the mirror this striking at filling in the face with no shiny board now right so lean onto the mirror just a little bit great beautiful you can almost see it in her face already all right so let's see all three side by side so see how nice the mirrors and gives you a little more space all right so let's turn the fan on let's just shoot a few which one do you guys like the best the third one is nice right? All right so when you used to say and see how her here's just tipping out on the bottom you just barely wanna lift it so you can hear uh see there little tips the hair spreading all right this is going to give you opposing techniques strong women don't stand like this they stand like that so let's pick you up like this like your barbie being picked up from here and then your face needs to come toward me your expressions need to be strong and alluring not necessarily smiling so head toward me can have a little squint your eyes and little smirk of smile on your face beautiful hold on one moment so again following her face with the focusing line every time she moves great beautiful you can laugh a little bit if you like good you don't want your turn just a little bit here like that. Great. Beautiful. You could even take it off the ring hand. Just grab a little curl of hair. Show me pretty fingers and trying not to desk right? Maybe come up to here. Beautiful. Turn your palm towards your head. Beautiful. Awesome. Turn your head around this way a little bit and laugh something like your hand across your chest with a ring on it just lay flat. Beautiful, awesome. Great. So the wonderful thing about this little lighting setup I have here is you could just move around as long as she stays a projected over the mirror. You have good results. All right, so now I'm going to manipulate the light a little bit when the beauty dishes off, we have contrast to the light. Oh, excuse me when they sock is off and you're just working with the beauty dish slightly hard. So what I'd like to do now has put the sock on it's going to take both hate both of you off and then you're gonna put the power up one and I'm gonna put this all the way up on you. So I want you to lean out onto the table with your arms across like that just beautiful, beautiful gonna do one little test shot here good turn you head into the light just a little bit should down low forehead toward me beautiful once um let's take a peek at that just a tiny bit hot beautiful smile with your eyes just to touch good awesome now turn yourself completely to besides, your hair is so pretty great put your shoulders back and down there great beautiful turned head into the light old more awesome all right, let's, try your cake, pan thiss ones really pretty is coming up so would this one you're gonna have just a little bit of shadowy light not coming through you talk about the occasions in which you would use the sock over the beauty addition when not when I'm demonstrating this on her this doesn't mean that you have any of these qualities but have you a photograph someone that has really deep set eyes darker discoloration around the eyes even make up cover shows when you used the beauty dish close up like that you really want a heavy foundation on completely smoothes out every once in a while it can show you more texture than you want so the softness will even smooth it out a little softer mature women or anybody that's got a lot of texture and discoloration here I usually come back in with soft box each step of the lighting change is that I'm going to show you is another remedy to help fill in when darkness appears on someone's face, sometimes you don't see all of the stuff in action till the makeup gets put on. But it's, usually darker ethnicities that you'll see that that there have natural, darker colorations around the eyes. You're really gonna wanna use a softer south box like that. But traditionally, sometimes I even build a soft box on each side or bored on each side to help completely fill in the face. So there's, a total beauty box should be good to go, by the way. Okay, great. So let's pull this up like we had it, and then that's kind of what happens here when you filled it all the way up, right angles on that. Do you see how her face is being filled in there, just even by moving them? Uh the lighting as we see it there even get here with this little guy turned up that eleven blessing but a hair out of her face beautiful beautiful smiling eyes beautiful little hair on your lip there beautiful bring your forehead toward mention download beautiful face here awesome let's take a peek of what we have here coming so my favorite is the beauty dish with the softness with the phil card right underneath the chin awesome take a peek at our history graham so this appears light but my history ram is telling me that I was nothing blown out so I prefer lighter skin smooth clean skin like that and then if I don't have it then when I'm going to process it I boost the contrast a little bit drop the saturation just a little bit kicked the black speck up after I overall lightning I play in a safe zone there on dh if you guys want me to show you that a certain point I can but what you're really trying to do is get skin light bright smooth and still have the kick of contrast a little black to fill in edges would be really happy with that it'll make your retouching go down smoother too I had asked her to bring the make up all the way down in the summer time we're just ending the season people are still tan on their neck people that said screen on the face and not on the record, I don't know why, especially round the back, I guess we just don't think about it, but if you could go ahead and asked the artist to take care of that for you could be thankful in the turn it off. All right, so I'm going to switch up the light totally now so you can stand up and just kind of take a break, get something to drink. So for the most part, I'm looking for beautiful lightning eyes. I want to really even catch light. If I pull up the sideboard, you want him straight what that does by putting this around? And not only does it phil in the face, but it makes the pupil look intense and the iris of the eye becomes illuminated evenly all the way around. Therefore, the color pops when you're blowing the hair like that, the hair will fall, so just monitor when you work with your makeup artist, maybe ask her before you go out to shoot if she can stay with you because you want to keep her pump in the hair up about every ten frames so that you have that volume that you're looking for, but the hair should always be moving in those pictures. To this side strain on it doesn't have to be curled you know some people think that just automatically curling the hair means dressed up if the hair needs that volume great you can also do a blowing straight and it's got the same kind of impact so what I'm going to do now as the girls are just kind of switch the light out for me and then I'm just gonna keep showing you all the different things that I do in the same scenario so if you only had one light you could at least manipulate it in the way I just showed you I'm going to show you to several different ways to make a white background white att the same time because sometimes people only want that on your going so well why okay fine if you cropped in close like that it almost doesn't matter you know a lot of times has to do with the fact that it's going to be published in a book and a pageant book across from all the other pictures yes question when you're adjusting your exposure kept reducing your aperture is opposed to increase in your shutter speed is there any reason why well your shutter speed we're not is concerned with the shutter speed in here because we're not looking for the ambient light that exists we're doing a study studio derive shot and your flash really is only controlled by your f stop at that point, in other words, you're turning up and down the power and you're allowing that light to come in out so your shutter speed would be fine if you had a background like let's say we were shooting from the windows you wanted to see those windows, then you might consider a shutter speed adjustment your sutter speed exposes for the ambient light and your f stop explosives for your flash you're following me on that so if the ambient light is part of your pictures when you consider that and if it's not you know we work with the flash, you just tighten down the f stop or if you're wanting to shoot it f ate like we were, then you turn the power down to meet your needs. Sometimes I'm putting soft fabrics over the light in layers of more and more layers to turn down the light because I can't get the light to turn down low enough. So, um again the beauty this has been a favorite because of that I've used the beauty dish outside I think I showed you some shots this morning of a catalogue that I shot used the beauty dish in the woods to help me like part of a background that had fallen to darkness and it needed to be full of life full color color, so it was easier for me to camouflage the beauty dish in the background behind a tree then it would be a soft box or some other form and then I used the soft box the life subject it looks more like natural like phil, so a lot of times you're tryingto find that natural light fails, sometimes you're trying to find that sparkle of glamour and glamour usually means more light uh more controlled like so what I'm doing now is just a classic clamshell ali we did the classic cam shale with one light with reflectors and phil just now now we're going to do it with light in this particular scenario, both lights should be said at the same power about as low as they could go. I make myself a space that I can shoot through that has just enough room from my lens to fit through there. I've been shooting everything today with eighty five, but you may be interested in shooting eighty five or seventy three hundred on a longer lands she has a really beautiful short face longer subject longer lands you can back up if share comes in where somebody has really long face you want really long lens and get far away from the subject light for me this clamshell works on everyone I don't know that I would shoot it on men muchas women so today saw me using shadowy light on the guy because it makes them look more interesting so just remember, women want to be told, and young and beautiful guys wanna be sexy and edgy looking, so you're like kind of goes off to the side a little bit, all right, two males having a question before I go right into shooting this and talking about power. Yes, on my own my question, I guess, and regards the difference see the difference of the different lightings that you do to change your makeup very much based on that. I know you talked about mohr makeup for theatrical, but when you went from natural light earlier this morning to into this, are you changing your makeup based on your lady? Sometimes, yes, and sometimes I do that I work with the makeup artist try to be as gracious in his graceful as I can about how I construct the shoot, not just about the shot I want to do or how fast I can get the job done, you know which sometimes you hear that coming from people like to mate it's like bursting the bubble of what you're trying to do when people won't leave go home early, but I try to start within most natural makeup, first in the natural light set first and the most natural looking hair, and then I try to build the structure of the shot, knowing that the more volume that goes in the hair the more interesting the hair can become or glamorous the hair could become and we actually did that today for this shoot she's going to be in the beauty shots were doing now and the next shot it was just a bigger, sexier, more teased up version and the hair works the more product you put in it the more volume you can get out of it and the wilder you could make it look so usually start with the tame clean all american and build up so in a daily shoot the makeup to answer your question more specifically the makeup and the lighting would build on its intensity based on the lighting so the more light the more clam are the more fantasy than were artsy them or edgy and the more harder the light the more makeup the person's face khun stand in that light so depending on how you process out the image you can get the same kind of look toe happen and daylight natural light situation but you really going to want to play with it and photoshopping tweak it and get it into more of an art driven thing and the natural but that have answer the question and also it depends on the person you know and what their ranges like for example, this young lady could look like she could be on any tv show she could be on in a pageant she could be fashion model she could also possibly step out into being like a singer or something. So when you think about headshots and how you could range somebody in that way, if she had the time, the budget and time to put into the shots with you it's like four different areas, she goes walking into her agent with four or five different shots like that, and they see the range than they get excited about that first that she's gone to the trouble, and she knows what she's doing that also helps when you know what you're doing to help lead them there, then you get them there. And instead of doing one shot, something that the door wondered what happens, you really thought about them and what you could do for them, how you make the most out of that. So the worst thing you can do is do too much makeup and do one shot and send it back. So if they've never had any photographs, they gotta have that ground up shot if you need them and that's all they've got the money for and you really think there's potential, and you really want to put at the effort into doing that next level of what the person could look like, it never will do you wrong if you do that for them. Call the agents that really saw this great person and they came to me for a classic head shot to be and, you know, it's a pageant, and I took them to the next level. I wanted to see what you thought about them and about what I did is a photograph, so build on it, and you may get to the point after you like home and what your skills are and make a name for yourself that you can do whatever you want. There's a couple of really famous photographs, photographers that I look up to there's, a guy named the deal that does amazing pageant pictures. If you guys want to study what he does, he actually does the miss usa pictures, miss america pictures and there's, not a single girl left photograph that made it that far that didn't shoot with him and just blossom for their career. So you kind of want to know who's king in the business and the model yourself after that, pageant pictures are going to be the halfway point between full rockstar and natural girl next door. Okay, so and when you meet girls that are beautiful, they're not quite tell enough the pageant industries and avenue they can get involved in to feel like they're still making a point to be in the fashion industry. But they don't have to be five, eleven or twelve. Ten help. All right, we've got some questions. We can ask the online audience while we're getting this all set up. All right, first question is coming in from a photo graphic sonam miami asking, how do you decide when to use a beauty dish versus clam shell with a soft boxes? Their rule of thumb? I like this is just my personal preference. I love the mirror sparkling in the I, um there is a christmas about that, that it makes the whole largest pop. And when you go in with the be all the beauty lining around it and then have that mirror there, it just puts a piercing point right in the eye that makes it really, really special. So klamm all the way. Um, when? When I choose to use a self box, when I've got more toward a glamour head shot instead of a pageant headshot, I would soften that light down a little bit to the soft boxes and build a clamshell type of effect. And you can do the clam shell, you know, positioning with an umbrella like the big eighty four inch umbrella had today, you can also do this with your speed lights. All of these setups could be done there as well. The apollo strip bank and the rogue modifiers are beautiful to do the same sort of thing with you just have to see him in a little closer. Okay, so give that a try let's do more questions. Okay, wonderful. This one is from fashion tv and sing it for a long time. You were here on creative live and lou for beauty head shots. Is hollywood lighting still in demand? And what exactly is such lighting? Any advice for us too? That's? Such lighting? Or is it? I would say it's, probably in more than ever on the reason why I say that I'm going to give you an example, just google when you get done today or when you take a break google angelina jolie and try to find the glamour pictures and she and elizabeth taylor were the epitome of glamour to me. Um when you think about angelina angelina jolie, you could see her with no makeup on and she looks amazing and then the next picture stylized wet hair in a pool something like that glamour steps outside the boundaries to me off what a normal headshot iss you're trying to make that person, you're really selling that person, so if you get someone front of the camera that has all the potential, the shot is a beauty do it, shoot him what they came there for and then shoot him is the beauty nine times out of ten, they'll pick the beauty, so just the clothes don't even almost matter could be bare shoulder, just gorgeous, beautiful hair and makeup. If someone has on that same notice, someone has the potential to be stretched outside of that boundary like let's say you have somebody come to you that's got wet, curly hair and that's the only way they see themselves and you have somebody working for you two at that day on the hair and makeup, you could straighten that out and then put some wave into its something like what she has and take them into another arena and then maybe straighten it from there that could totally change the way the person comes across. They may look like average beauty in the neighborhood that you live in with the curly hair, but then suddenly you've taken him up to these next levels, so beauty lighting and glamour lighting on those types of environments are going to be where steps up a little bit. It tested makeup to step up a little bit to meetyou andi usually having an idea or a theme or character toe look let's say you wanted to do something floating in the pool um you're going to want a light for that and I would definitely go in the glamour like there's. Some images. I'm going to show you guys tomorrow and my lecture, where I shot somebody floating in a pool with flowers everywhere. And I did it with my speed lights, and I was able to use the hard light straight out of the two. But when I say straight out the two, that means with no modifier, you'll hear me say that straight out the tube. Nothing, or I'll redirect it with just the grid and just narrow down the scope on use the sun. So when we're in other situations other than a studio, sometimes you break out of the box just a little bit.

Class Description

Ready to add a new, lucrative dimension to your photography business? Join CreativeLive instructor Lou Freeman to learn everything you need to know to take controlled, candid, and commercial portraits and headshots.

The skills you learn throughout this workshop can be applied to iconic portraits, pageant and glamour shots, headshots and other commercial photos, and beyond. You’ll learn about the industry standards for each type of portrait, including how to work professionally with a wide variety of clients. Lou will guide you through determining the unique goal of each shoot and developing a plan for giving clients the results they want. As Lou takes portraits live in-studio, she’ll share foolproof lighting and posing strategies. You’ll also build strategies for marketing and pitching to clients.

By the end of this course, you’ll have the artistic skills to take classic, iconic portraits and the marketing skills to attract clients who’ll drive your business.

Dianne N

Awesome class! Well worth the cost for advice and expertise from such an amazing photographer. Lou Freeman is an excellent teacher. She explains and describes in detail how she is photographing, why she is doing it that way, the equipment she is using and how to interact with your subject. I can use these headshot strategies in every aspect of my photography. Thank you Lou!

Kent Youngblood

Really enjoyed the class and thought Lou did a great job explaining her process with headshots. I've used her headshot approach with natural light on numerous occasions and came up with stunning shots.